It's used to us,
we are as midnight.
We walk the shoreline,
a threshing of shadows.
Then a crow, street cleaner of everywhere
nobody thanks.
Ignored in that black elegant way
of dark approaching itself
from all sides.
The moon raises its head
of white gravel.
Clouds creak above.
We leave our sunburnt bones
on piles of wet clothes.
I fall though staircases of sand
in a memory of sleep.
This lift of waves,
silk-hedged currents.
Daylight has nothing to do
with our sharing sight of it.
I crave midnight.
Lonely is a start.
So is the crow, its button-black bait pulling
in the senses to vanish horizons.
Midnight hushes every tone,
so you become hushed by it.
Our familiar limbs angle
into those days without antidote.
We watch so hard we nearly crack the sky open
with moisture.
The age of an evening
covers our eyes.
ABOUT:
At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).
EDITOR'S SONG PAIRING: Riyo -- Hushes
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